Notre mariage

Chieko Baishô's parents are seaweed farmers. Their crops are being destroyed by the rising pollution in the industrial city. She and her sister, Noriko Maki, work for the big factory that is destroying their parents' business, taking home less than ten thousand yen a month -- about $30. Their parents can't make ends meet. Not only do the girls pay rent, but their mother keeps 'borrowing a thousand yen to pay the bills as they come in.

Miss Baishô has reached the marriageable age, and suddenly is confronted wth three suitors. One is the unseen son of their father's union chief. That marriage would make things a lot better for her family. Another is a visitor who turns out to be a childhood friend. Back then he was a black marketeer; now he is a salaryman for the same company she works for, earning a handsome 30,000 yen a month. The third is a laborer at the factory. He earns 17,000 yen a month. She seems to favor the third, but fears the poverty she has known all her life.

In the US, of course, this would have been a comedy, like TOM, DICK AND HARRY, with Ginger Rogers playing an amiable ditz. In Masahiro Shinoda's movie, however, it's a serious drama. In a Japan, coming out of the poverty of the postwar period, and with the newfound prosperity unevenly divided, it is a serious issue: can true love win out over security?

This is an early movie directed by Masahiro Shinoda (his sixth) and thus made before he was able to select the projects he wanted to make. Most of the early movies of his that I've seen so far have been well made but plagued with inferior scripts. But, even though Shinoda did not later seem to have much affection for this movie, it is superior to most of his early work and stands up well on its own. The story is set in a fishing community where many family's traditional way of life is threatened by encroaching industrialization. The lead characters are a couple who collect and sell seaweed and their two grown daughters who have taken jobs at a local factory to help make ends meet. The oldest daughter has reached an age where she is starting to attract marriage proposals and the main plot of the movie is over the question of whether she is going to marry for love or money. Shinoda was only given three weeks to shoot this(which may explain its running time of 66 minutes) but you would never guess that by looking at it. Shinoda was apparently incapable of making a visually uninteresting movie and this one is no exception. And for once he was given a script worthy of him. A story of this type could easily have descended into sentimentality, but the script and Shinoda's restraint make this a very enjoyable movie.